I didn’t hate The Super Mario Galaxy Movie, because that would imply that it invoked an emotional response from me. The movie is energetic but inert, a story with no purpose besides offering up visuals. Little kids and fans of the games may enjoy it, but for me the movie was listless and uninvolving. Not recommended. Continue reading The Super Mario Galaxy Movie
If anything, Undertone proves that using podcasting as the basis for a horror movie has minimal returns. While there are spooky moments, the film is a mishmash of ideas that never lead anywhere besides scary noises and shadows. Not recommended. Continue reading Undertone
When Emerald Fennell’s adaptation of “Wuthering Heights” was announced over a year ago, I wondered why she included the title in quotation marks. Were they the equivalent of air quotes, implying that her take on the source material would be satirical or ironic? Unfortunately, Fennel wasn’t telling. Like everyone else, I would need to wait until the movie came out. Before I provide my answer, I want to note how this was a genius stroke on Fennell’s behalf. This minor but idiosyncratic alteration made us all curious about yet another adaptation of the well-known book. If the mark of an effective director is grabbing our attention, Fennell aced that assignment.
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In When Harry Met Sally, the characters are blocked from taking the logical next step in their relationship by their neurosis. Eventually they come to their senses and there’s a happy ending. A Big, Bold, Beautiful Journey has basically the same premise, except that this time the couple spend the movie undergoing couples therapy before winding up together. Call it When Harry and Sally Went to Psychoanalysis. While this alternative take on the rom-com formula is intriguing, the movie’s emotional impact is underdone by its episodic nature and awkward tonal shifts.
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Eddington may represent a first for cinema, a mainstream movie making light of a modern pandemic. To my knowledge, there hasn’t been a humorous take on SARS, Ebola, the opioid crisis or AIDS. This isn’t to say that such a movie couldn’t have been made. As George Carlin once noted, there’s no topic that’s off-limits when it comes to comedy. However, using a traumatic event like the Covid pandemic as the source of laughs requires a take no prisoners approach, no matter how insensitive it may be perceived. That’s the fundamental problem with Eddington, which is too selective in the targets and too gentile in how it handles what it does take aim at. The movie is timid where it needed to be ruthless, circuitous when it should have been forthright.
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Remember Nedry, the fat guy played by Wayne Night in Jurassic Park? Rebirth hopes that you do, because its opening scene is a weird callback to his character. Seventeen years ago, before the events in Jurassic World took place, the scientists at InGen were just starting to experiment with dinosaur DNA. One scientist curiously tries to eat a candy bar just before entering a controlled environment. The guy is a slob and carelessly drops the wrapper just before he enters a sealed chamber with a dinosaur in it. The wrapper gets sucked into the door’s ventilation and shorts it out. Uh oh. In the rush to lock everything down, the candy bar guy is left staring face-to-face with a very nasty dinosaur. The lesson here is to not be a slob, because the repercussions are fatal.
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Juror #2 is a movie about difficult choices and how our moral compass tends to shift when our circumstances change. What we believe in the abstract suddenly becomes untenable when the things we value are at risk. The difficulties involved with making the right choice despite the consequences has been a reliable subject for drama films, including several of director Clint Eastwood’s best (Unforgiven, Mystic River, Million Dollar Baby, and American Sniper). It also happens to be the theme of Juror #2, which is what I imagine attracted Eastwood to the material. The movie places the protagonist in an increasingly stressful situation and asks him to be an upstanding, law-abiding citizen. However, doing so puts him directly at odds with being a good husband and father, which makes “the right choice” not so clear-cut.
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I enjoy horror movie cliches. I wouldn’t be able to watch as many horror movies as I do if I didn’t. For example, most horror movies have at least one scene where a door emits an agonizing squeak while opening slowly. Just like the light that stops working at the worst possible moment, the creaky door moment is a staple of horror movies. These cliches and horror movies go together like hands and gloves, bacon and eggs or Michael Myers and Halloween. Even though I can sense when a creaky door is about to make an appearance, I always appreciate when a movie does them correctly. The problem I had with Cobweb isn’t that it has at least a half-dozen creaky door scenes, but that none of them had any effect on me. Even worse is that I had the same reaction to every other scary element in this movie: none.
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Serial killers are a fortunate bunch. While the job does require a commitment to planning, attention to detail and a level of perseverance that few can muster, it’s also heavily dependent upon luck. Take The Butcher, the serial killer at the center of Trap, who somehow manages his homicidal enterprise in addition to being a devoted family man and a firefighter. His dedication to all facets of his life is nothing short of admirable. For starters, The Butcher’s daily schedule must be a logistical nightmare. He must ping-pong between his home, putting out fires and attending to victims–residing at any one of his covert murder houses–without getting caught. The Butcher may be good, but nobody’s that good. Luck is always present to give serial killers a little helpful nudge when they’re so close to being caught. In Trap, The Butcher is so darn lucky that he must be living the Life of Riley.
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If you’re an American and are desperately running from your past, where should you go? To a pet shop in Galway, Ireland, of course. Given how essential this detail is to the entire story of The Watchers, you would think it would be addressed at some point, but no. For a movie that is ultimately about the importance of getting the details right, The Watchers rarely bothers to do so. While it does stop at regular intervals to deliver unwieldy gobs of exposition that explain what is happening, it never concerns itself with why. It’s a story that insists on giving a perfectly logical explanation for everything, but doesn’t make any logical sense.
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Detroit Cineaste 